


Falling (In Low Gravity)

by undergoingCalibrations



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: more to come - Freeform, will update characters as i actually include them
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-10
Updated: 2017-07-10
Packaged: 2018-11-30 13:36:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11464674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/undergoingCalibrations/pseuds/undergoingCalibrations
Summary: Borderlands is a series made rich by its implicit depths- by the traumas and triumphs we the players cannot see as a matter of our necessarily limited scope. There are gaps in this story, gaps in it's characters, gaps in knowledge and in time. Falling (In Low Gravity) is a collection of the blanks as I have filled them. Ultimately, this is just an anthology of vignettes and reflections on the games that keep me up at night, but one I hope you find enriching if you enjoy the series.





	Falling (In Low Gravity)

There’s a yellow star falling in his eyes, reflected, regarding him in the glass. Not the brand that bears wishes, mind you, not that brief meteor that dashes itself against the atmosphere without even leaving a scar, that you tell your children makes dreams real because it’s easier than explaining the nightmares-

No, this is another phenomenon entirely.

Its cargo is souls, not wishes. Six to be precise. Thousands rest on its sound delivery. One remainder to ensure the parcel is secure, sure, but he is the last you will need to lecture on the greater good and the things we do for it.

And so the remainder watches. In the end, it’s just an oversized bullet loosed from a geostationary gun, yet the shimmering instant when sparks streaming it passed just beyond his window, why that almost made up for the echoing of the soldiers’ footsteps. He was after all not put on this earth (not that anyone was put on earth, not anymore) to simply gawk at some eminent shrapnel. If he was left behind it was for a reason. 

If all goes as planned, he’ll die. He’ll take out his share of men, and with their blood and his buy the seconds separating Helios from its fiery grave in Elpis’ orbit. He’ll die and the man in the bunker years ago will die with him. The man who gave his life for a cold and distant moon, for the innocents clinging to this station’s shattered shell, yes, this is the man who will live on. She will look to the skies and remember him well.

Never you mind, that the baleful eye boring even now into Hope’s dark heart was plucked from a god and fashioned into a weapon by his own hands. Never you mind, the inexorability with which the man in the bunker is waiting for the man on the station to remember they were and are one and the same. Never you mind, for any minute now his story will end with his having sent off six finer souls to grant that last ardent wish and all these faults will come to nothing.

The lasers come alive in his hands. Golden arrows fit to pierce the legion closing in on his position. Arrows the likes of which he fancies Hercules might have loosed in the triumph of his own labours. And like Hercules, his enemy is hydra, two heads rushing in for every commando slain. He’s a coder, not a killer, not made of whatever steel it is that lets men visit death as others might an old friend, but there is satisfaction where his luminous arrows meet the porcelain place between those soldiers’ eyes. Only a few more seconds now. Only a few more bodies on the ground and he can stop. They’ll find him, bled out on the control panel, and say to themselves, “Here lies a hero”.

It is with something like joy that he imagines finally besting the man in the bunker, the man below. The man in the bunker could not have anticipated such an audacious escape as this one, taking a running leap off the mortal coil before their battle had well and truly begun. The self-same satisfaction pooling incarnadine at his feet will not stain him in the grave, it can’t. He is tired of running from the man, so tired one of these days he’ll slip and fall and he knows he is not strong enough to get back up. 

So he stays to die alone on a space station because he is not Hercules but the monster waiting at the end of this twelfth and most terrible trial and this is the only way by which he might yet be slain.

By the time the light on his wrists is spent to sparks the living have long stopped replacing the dead. He regards his reflection, starry-eyed, till breath fogs the glass. Dilated pupils making what little sense they can of the abyss. Waiting for something, anything, perhaps sunrise. 

Not that there is morning on this station.


End file.
